All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [86]
“Of course. Just leave me a message as to time and place, and I’ll be there.”
They hung up and Taylor felt terrible. Here the woman’s sister was dead, her husband was perpetually out of town on business and she couldn’t even contact her younger brother to help make the funeral arrangements. For a privileged life, it seemed very lonely.
Taylor decided the best thing she could do was get into the office. She brushed her still-wet hair into a ponytail, grabbed a Diet Coke and her keys.
The phone rang just as she was getting ready to walk out the door. She set her things down and answered it. Baldwin’s voice boomed through the line as if he were in the next room, and she felt an overwhelming loneliness. Silly, she chided herself, he would be home soon.
“Hi, honey. Everything okay up there in North Carolina?”
“Well, no one’s gone missing this morning, so I guess we’re making improvements. I can’t predict this one, Taylor, and it’s driving me crazy.”
“Then sit down and write me a love poem,” she teased. “That should get your mind off things and back to where it belongs.”
The comment was greeted with silence. Taylor wasn’t hurt exactly, but she felt stung, usually Baldwin would coo right back at her. But before she could say anything, he spoke.
“What made you say that?”
“Well, I’m sorry, hon, I was just joking around. They’ve been on my mind since I saw them at Whitney Connolly’s house. She had a boyfriend or admirer that was sending her love poems in her e-mails, and I read a couple while I was going through her stuff. It’s no big deal.”
But Taylor could feel the intensity coming off Baldwin through the phone. “Taylor, do you remember what the poems were? Anything in particular about them?”
“No, I didn’t pay that close attention. Why, Baldwin, what’s going on?”
“We haven’t released this to the press, okay, so I need you to keep it very quiet. The killer is leaving the victims poems. Love poems, classics by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats. You have to get me the poems off Whitney Connolly’s computer.”
“At the crime scenes? I don’t recall anything like that at Shauna Davidson’s apartment.”
“One of Grimes’s men found it in her desk drawer. They are completely innocuous, unless you know what to look for, the notes are easily missed.”
“Jesus, Baldwin, if you’d told me I could have given you all of this yesterday. It didn’t even register, I only glanced at a couple of them. Crap.”
Taylor’s head felt like it was going to spin off into space. She loved it, that rush of adrenaline that came when you got the big break. Things were making a little sense now. The notes.
“Baldwin, Whitney was trying desperately to reach her sister yesterday, remember? Her memo on her cell phone that you suggested I check? There was a message there that she needed to talk to Quinn about the notes. We thought it was something benign, like note cards. Maybe we were wrong. What do you think?”
“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. But I want you to get a hold of those poems and read them to me, let me see if they’re a match to what we’re getting at the scenes. The killer may be a fan of Whitney Connolly’s, who knows. Can you get to that computer?”
“Yeah, let me call Quinn Buckley and get permission to go into Whitney’s house again. I’ll call you as soon as I have them in front of me.”
Baldwin flipped on the news, trying to gauge public opinion on their handling of the case. The murders were the lead story, the sensational nature of the slayings, the fact that all the victims had a medical tie-in, the speed at which the killer was progressing. Everyone was baffled, desperate for answers. Gun sales were on the rise, and locksmiths were doing a brisk business all along the southeast corridor. Great, nothing worked better for an investigation than instilling